Early twentieth-century courts used Persians as a hinge to define Middle Easterners’ race

Evidence

Immigrants from Asia and the broad Middle East put the boundaries of whiteness to the legal test in the early twentieth century. Their racial prerequisite cases etched into law exactly which immigrants from which countries were white and, in the process, even pushed groups not yet present in the United States back and forth across the color line. A half century before their arrival en masse, “Persians” were a racial hinge for competing claims to whiteness and strategically portrayed as white or not white to help determine the radically different fates of Armenian, Arab, and South Asian Americans. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 530

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: A case-study instance of courts deciding who counts as white, expanding on how whiteness was adjudicated as imprecise and high-stakes in ‘Grafting & Growth’ territory of who the state admits.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone studying immigration law or Middle Eastern American history: ‘Persians’ were the legal hinge case for Armenian, Arab, and South Asian whiteness claims.

Related

• Early US courts defined Middle Eastern whiteness by reference to Iranians. (similarity 0.90)
• Iranians functioned as a racial hinge anchoring others’ claims to whiteness (similarity 0.86)
• Early twentieth-century courts positioned Iran as a borderland for whiteness (similarity 0.86)
• Iranians functioned as a racial hinge in early naturalization cases. (similarity 0.86)
• Iran functioned as a racial hinge deciding Asian whiteness in US courts (similarity 0.85)
• Iran functioned as a racial hinge in US citizenship law (similarity 0.83)
• Earlier immigrants argued their own whiteness by distancing from Iranians (similarity 0.82)
• Iran has functioned as a racial fencepost determining whiteness’s boundaries (similarity 0.80)
• Legally-white Middle Easterners lack recourse since law can’t grasp white-on-white bias (similarity 0.79)
• Middle Easterners are too white for legal redress yet too non-white to escape racism (similarity 0.79)